Chapter 108 - The Battle for Baal (4)
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The Thunderhawk bucked violently through the blood-red sandstorm.
Flesh Tearers Chapter Master Seth clung to the bulkhead and stared out through the scratched viewport.
Evacuating Baal Secundus. A bitter, swallowed compromise.
The moment the Thunderhawk punched clear of the atmosphere, both of Seth's hearts skipped a beat.
Near orbit, which should have been choked black with Tyranid bioships, had been swept nearly clean of the sky-blotting hive fleet.
In their place: rank upon rank of mighty warships, each one stamped with the Imperial Aquila. The number in orbit hadn't dropped. It had doubled.
"Imperial reinforcements..." Seth's voice cracked, splitting raw from sheer disbelief.
A fire called hope detonated in the chest of the despairing old veteran.
Baal was saved.
The three returned Primarchs led the fleet, seizing absolute void supremacy over the entire system. Nearly twenty Primaris Chapters — each at Legion strength — bore down on Baal Prime itself.
The de facto supreme commanders of this vast host were Horus and Sanguinius. But those two were rather busy at the moment, ripping Ka'Bandha apart with their bare hands on Baal Secundus. So command of the primary campaign fell to the shoulders of one man: former Sons of Horus Tenth Captain, Garviel Loken.
Loken did not micromanage.
He laid out the broad strategic vectors for all twenty Chapters across the hololithic star-map, assigned each its defensive sector, and then let them off the leash.
Instincts honed across the Great Crusade told him the truth every good commander learned: the tighter you grip the front line, the more it slips. Set the warriors loose, give them their objective, and trust them to take it. That was the most efficient way to wage war.
On the ground, the battle wasn't a war. It was a slaughter.
BOOM!
A heavy tank ground over a carpet of chitinous corpses, its main cannon roaring deafeningly as it blasted a distant Hive Tyrant into a rain of shredded meat.
The hatch flipped open. The old knight Kullen heaved himself half out of the cupola, a Heavy Boltgun cradled in his fists, ripping the swarm apart on full auto. The veteran had rediscovered the old rhythm, the one he'd learned serving in the Dark Angels' Dreadwing. Heavy fire to scour the ground. Armor to grind forward. Whatever was loudest and most brutal, that was the answer.
Kaelen wasn't idle either. 6 Dark Age of Technology battle-automatons stepped from his summoning and marched into the densest concentrations of the swarm. Six emotionless killing machines. Wherever they passed, only charred chitin remained.
The swarm's vaunted numerical advantage was crumbling at terrifying speed.
And beyond the regular Imperial advance, on the battlefield's flanks, came reinforcements that defied every rule of reality.
As the Great Rift split open, hundreds upon hundreds of Astartes, every one of them sheathed in burning psychic fire, tore through into realspace.
The Shackled Legion.
They raised no battle cry. They simply opened fire, purifying every inch of xenos-fouled ground with bolt and flame.
But what truly broke the swarm's command network was a single figure streaking through the heart of the battlefield.
He was too fast.
Even Astartes reflexes couldn't catch more than a smear. The figure hunted synapse creatures with surgical precision. One second a Tyranid Warrior was scything down the front line. The next, its head was already airborne.
On the high walls of the Tower of Amareo.
Dante gasped for breath, both hands braced on the haft of his axe. The Chapter Master, who had served a thousand years, stood stunned by what he was watching.
These newcomer warriors stood a full head taller than his own Marines, and their tactical coordination, their fire discipline, it was almost obscene.
He turned to the Primaris captain standing at his side.
"You have my thanks for the reinforcement." Dante pointed down into the ruins, at that blur of motion no eye could lock onto. "Tell me — who is that warrior, slaughtering the synapse creatures? Not even the finest champion of any Chapter could fight like that."
The Primaris captain followed his gaze. His voice was flat.
"That is a Primarch. Lord Konrad Curze."
Dante froze.
Behind him, his Sanguinary Guard tightened their grips on their weapons by pure reflex.
Curze?
The Night Haunter? Master of the Eighth Legion?
The traitor Primarch of the Heresy?
Dante drew 2 deep breaths and forced the dread back down into his chest. Whether the newcomer had been a traitor or not, right now he was killing Tyranids for the Blood Angels. That was the Emperor's blessing made flesh.
And to lay eyes on a living Primarch, any Primarch, that alone was enough to drown out a great many historical concerns.
Before Dante could finish swallowing his shock, the Primaris captain added more.
"He did not come alone. Two other Primarchs accompany Lord Curze."
Two more?
Beneath his death-mask, Dante's aged face twitched, racked by a yearning he could barely contain.
In that exact instant, not only him, but every Son of Sanguinius on the wall, felt a true call resonate up from the deepest strand of their gene-seed. It was no illusion. It could not be.
"Then... who else?" Dante's voice began to shake. His hands locked on the axe-haft until his finger bones went white beneath the gauntlets. He needed to hear that name. He needed it.
"It is Sanguinius, Commander Dante."
Thud.
One of the elite Sanguinary Guard collapsed to his knees on the blood-soaked stone of the rampart.
Dante inhaled sharply. The smoke-bitter air filled his lungs. His vision blurred completely.
The gene-father had returned. He had come back to save his sons.
Joy.
Pure, devouring joy swept through every red-armored warrior on the wall.
Some flung their weapons aside, threw their heads back, and screamed their elation into the overcast sky.
And just as that fervor reached the point of bursting their skulls from the inside,
The Primaris captain, his face still utterly flat, delivered the final line. Like an ice bucket emptied onto a bonfire.
"There is one more. Horus Lupercal."
The air on the wall solidified.
The Blood Angels who had been raising their arms in triumph one second earlier now had their battle cries jammed halfway up their throats, twisting into a strange, strangled croak.
The kneeling veteran's tears stopped, caught, frozen, in his eyes.
Dante's axe slipped from his fingers and clanged against the marble.
Horus?
The Arch-Traitor. The murderer of their gene-father. The wellspring of all evil.
And he had come with Sanguinius?
A jagged, schizophrenic madness ripped through the Blood Angels' line. The ecstasy in their gene-seed hadn't yet faded, but at that name, the curses of the Black Rage and the Red Thirst were dragged screaming to their breaking point.
Marines who had been laughing a heartbeat ago now had eyes flooding red, bestial snarls grinding up out of their throats.
Half their minds sang hosannas to the Great Angel.
The other half howled to put a chainsword through Lupercal's spine.
The central processor burned out.
"God-Emperor preserve us... Blood preserve us..."
Dante clutched at his helmet, repeating the words like a litany he could not stop.
A thousand years of service, and the millennium-old commander could not process an information load this far beyond the cognitive limits of carbon-based life. For one wild second, he genuinely wondered if a Tyranid psychic assault had finally cracked his mind open.
➤ Next: The Battle of Baal (End)
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